My Corpus choice
My corpus consists of a collection of songs from various genres including mainly Pop, Rap, and Phonk (which is a sub genre of hip hop and trap music). These three genres are divided into three playlist for easier comparisons among them. Something interesting to keep in mind: I personally listen to these different genres under various circumstances. For example I tend to listen mostly to Pop when studying, while when working out I like to listen to Rap to give me that extra energy, and finally when gaming I tend to listen mostly to Phonk to focus in a game. Also note that both the Rap and Phonk playlist are from spotify’s catalog while the Pop playlist was made by myself. However the Pop playlist is actually more of a mix of popular songs I gathered from over the years. Since most of them are therefore classified as Pop, I will just refer to this playlist as the Pop genre playlist. It will be interesting to see if there are some songs in this Pop playlist which could actually better have been placed in one of the other two playlist according to spotify’s API features. So basically this corpus was chosen because I want to explore the differences and similarities among these various genres in terms of their musical characteristics and find out which songs typically fit into each category. Initially these three main genres within my corpus seem very different, so I thought it would be interesting to see if there were any specific overlapping musical characteristics which makes them so compelling for my taste in music.
Comparisons
The natural comparison points in my corpus are therefore the different genres: Pop, Rap, and Phonk. I expect to see differences in terms of rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyrics. For example, I expected Pop music to have a more upbeat rhythm and catchy lyrics compared to Rap music which might have a heavier beat and very different flowing lyrics. However, I also expected to see some similarities across genres, for example Rap and Phonk often seem to have a similar type beat and rhythm: heavy and fast paced. It will be interesting to explore the similarity and differences regarding the instruments and music keys/notes used in typical songs of each genre.
The tracks in my corpus are representative of the groups I want to compare, as I selected them based on their popularity and mainstream recognition within each genre. However, it is possible that my corpus might not cover all sub-genres within each main genre, and therefore may not represent the full scope of each genre.
Some examples of typical tracks in my corpus are “Invincible” by Pop Smoke, a popular Rap/Hiphop song, and “Counting Stars” by OneRepublic, a popular Pop song with its iconic vocal harmonies and theatrical elements. Atypical tracks in my corpus include “Sweater Weather” by the Neighbourhood, which is a mix between Indie rock and alternative rock, and “break from toronto” by PartyNextDoor, which could be classified as R&B or Hiphop but also contains a form of rap. These atypical songs may cause there to be some outliers in the data. These outliers may have to be filtered out first in order to be able to make the most fair comparison for each genre.
In conclusion, this portfolio will focus on exploring and analyzing the musical characteristics of Pop, Rap, and Phonk, to find out what makes them appealing to listen to under various circumstances.
Explanation This bar chart gives a good representation of the differences in key usage between the three genres. Something interesting to look at is the most used key for example, both Phonk and Rap make use of the C# key the most. However it seems that in Rap songs, this key is used almost twice as much as any other key on average, while in Phonk is seems to be relatively balanced with the other keys. It is also interesting to see that Phonk does not have a single instance of the D# key. Finally we can clearly see that out of the three genres, Pop seems to have the most balanced distribution of key usage since it uses all keys and does not really have one major outstanding key.
Explanation
Interestingly, even though both Phonk and Pop seem to have a preferred
tempo between 120 and 130 beats per minute (BPM), the plot shows that
Rap likes to have a little faster tempo on average: around 140 BPM.
However since the rap playlist includes the least amount of songs out of
the three genres, it seems that most songs I like are still around
120-140 BPM. Some other interesting thing to see that all three genres
also have a small peak at around 95 BPM, which is a lot slower than the
usual tempo of these genres. This could mean that is does in fact not
matter whether the tempo of a song is extraordinary for a specific
genre, the song could still thrive in a genre regardless of the tempo if
the song is still composed very well.
Explanation For this Third plot I decided to compare the valence and energy of The three genres: Pop, Rap and Phonk. Since I wanted to see if there was any correlation between the valence of and the energy of songs. I expected the Pop genre to have the highest average valence out of the three genres, since these songs are often linked to positive vibes. And Phonk to have the highest energy values on average, since this genre is associated with fast, loud and noisy music (as can be seen in the plot where bigger points indicate louder songs). Therefore it was no surprise to see that pop had indead a relatively high valence and Phonk had a relatively high energy. However I was surprised to find out that the Phonk genre actually also scored relatively high on average for valence too, since I assumed this fast and loud type of music would give off an angry vibe. This shows that there could be a correlation between the valence and energy of songs.
Explanation This boxplot shows that interestingly enough, rap seems to have the highest danceability value on average according to spotify’s measure. I would personally have guessed that Pop songs would have the highest danceability by a mile, so seeing Pop not scoring as high surprised me. I wonder what makes a song danceable by defenition of spotify, it would be interesting to see the exact features of this.
Explanation
Here you can see the mean tempo, the deviation of each song from that
mean tempo, the loudness in size and the bpm in the color of the point.
The biggest deviation can be found in the Rap category as there are some
outliers at the top of the plot. Pop seems to have the most stable bpm
range: more than 50% lies within the 120-140 bpm range.
Explanation Timbre, the quality of sound that distinguishes different musical instruments, is a crucial aspect of music. The analysis of timbre is often performed using spectral content, which measures the relative strengths of various frequency components that make up the sound. In this study, the focus was on a specific timbre component, which was used to isolate and study the outliers in the corpus.
For every 12 levels of timbre used by Spotify API I have plotted the range for first 25 songs from each of the three genre-playlists: Pop, Phonk and Rap.
Explanation A chromagram is a visual representation of the distribution of pitches in a musical recording. The first chromatogram shows that for the Pop song: “Counting Stars” by “OneRepublic”, the C# key has the longest time use by far and it seems that the C key comes second. The rest of the keys do not seem to get much playtime in comparison.
The second chromatogram shows that for the Pop song: “Close Eyes” by “DRVST”, the C key has the longest time use by far and it seems that the C#, F and E keys follow regarding playtime. The rest of the keys do not seem to get much playtime in comparison.
The third chromatogram shows that for the Pop song: “Invincible” by “Pop Smoke”, the F# key has the longest time use by far, all the other keys do not even come close to having as much playtime.
Interestingly there seems to be some overlap between Pop and Phonk specific songs, whereby both genres seem to have the most playtime of the C and C# keys while the A#, A, D#, D keys all seem to have not much playtime. Furthermore it looks like the Rap song also makes the least use of the A# and D# keys, however these are the only comparable points since the F# key is being used the longest by far and the rest of keys being almost equally distributed.
Explanation The ceptrograms show the changes regarding timbre of typical songs from each genre: Pop, Phonk and Rap. A ceptrogram is a visual representation of the distribution of timbral characteristics in a musical recording. Comparing the ceptrograms of three songs, “Payphone” from the Pop genre, “Sahara” from the Phonk genre and “Yonkers” from the rap genre, reveals interesting differences in their timbral distribution. In “Payphone” there is a relavtively strong concentration of timbral characteristics around a certain range, indicating a pretty stable sonic texture. On the other hand, both “Yonkers” and “Sahara” show more variation in timbral distribution, with a wider range of timbral characteristics. This suggests that these two have a more complex and varied sound texture. These differences in timbral distribution could contribute to the overall appeal of the songs and could be further explored in future analyses.